Review: Tell Me How It Ends, by Valeria Luiselli

by Sunita




The second, equally important, contribution is Luiselli’s description of the institutional conditions that have led to the exodus of people from Central America. It is a consequence of the wars of the 1980s and the unending demand for drugs in the United States. She doesn’t spare the United States or Mexico in showing how their decisions continue to contribute to an unbearable situation for thousands of ordinary people. Of course the governments of the sending countries are also at fault, but that fault is compounded and magnified by US policies and practices and aided by Mexico. Citizens are collateral damage, and even when immigrants are granted the right to stay in the US, they can wind up in the same network of gangs, drugs, and crime that pushed them away from their homes. 

From a literary point of view, this is a nonfiction essay with a narrative structure shaped more by the questions than by a character-driven storyline. It worked really well for me, because while we learn about the children and ache for them, Luiselli avoids sentimentality. Her writing is direct and empathetic. We know the toll it takes on her and her niece, who is translating with her, but apart from contrasting her situation to theirs (Luiselli and her husband were in the green-card process while she was doing this work), she doesn’t foreground herself or her emotions very often. The introduction, late in the book, of her college students and their activism, was a mostly successful section. On the one hand it reminds the reader that everyday activism can bring concrete benefits, and it injects a note of optimism. But set against the might of the immigration bureaucracy it feels so inadequate. 

This is a powerful, important piece of work and I hope that people who read her recent novel, which draws on these stories, will find it. That novel, Lost Children Archive, has been longlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s in my TBR and I’ll report back after I’ve read it.